We’re thrilled to announce CEO Matthew Gonnering has been named the overall 2019 Executive of the Year by In Business magazine. Now in its sixth year, the awards program celebrates exemplary business executives based on leadership, innovation, and company success. Gonnering and the other winners will be honored at an awards reception on February 19, 2019 at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison.

We spent a lot of quality time together in 2018 between Widen events, customer success conversations, UX field research, and more. All of these interactions gave us a lot of great insights into how we can continue to improve our products and services this year. So, if you like what we did in 2018, you’re going to love what we have in store for 2019!

Here’s a rundown of the things we’ll do, the places we’ll go, and the experiences we’ll create together this year.

2018 was a phenomenal year of growth for Widen and our Collective community! We celebrated 70 years of business and are ready for the next 70 as we work to become the most admired company in the world. We welcomed over 40 new Wideneers to the family between our North American headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin; and European headquarters in London. Our teams are proud to serve hundreds of the world’s most influential brands and a global community of 500,000 marketers, designers, salespeople, and technologists.

Empathy is an essential ability in our workplace. It helps our teams work better together, design better experiences for our customers, and give our work meaning.

We're expanding beyond the conventional software vendor role into strategy design, change management, and process improvement.

Madison Magazine’s annual ranking names Widen one of the city’s top ten large employers

Founded in 1948, Widen is an anomaly in the software space: a family-owned plate engraving business that reinvented itself into a global technology company. Widen’s history demonstrates how companies can adapt and thrive through technological disruptions.

In 1948, Emily and Arthur Widen founded Widen Engraving, a company that engraved plates for newspaper presses. Under their son, Mark Widen, the company expanded into additional prepress services, evolving from plates to film negatives and color printing. In 1985, Widen invested $3 million in color scanners and Scitex equipment not realizing how soon they’d have to divest.

While we’re actively supporting Widen Collective customers and users around the world, we’re thrilled to be enhancing that support by opening our European Headquarters in London, England. This new location will expand support hours and professional services for customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

How often do you take time in your day to be thankful? Or make an effort to express gratitude? When there’s a long list of to-dos, for work and personal life, it can be a challenge. That’s why I wanted to ask my fellow Wideneers what they were thankful for during the week of the US Holiday, Thanksgiving Day.

We’re always working hard to deliver value-driven changes to our software solutions.

Sometimes changes in our software are obvious, like when we launch a new product like Portals. Or when there’s a visual change to the user interface. Other times, changes are less obvious, like when we work on the back-end to support increased consumption of 25 million total assets, bulk uploads of 1.5 million assets, and 14 million embed code views per day.

To help you understand how our teams are always working to deliver the best solution, we wanted to share how we make software at Widen.